Baseline Emissions Inventory (BEI) Local Authority Climate Action Plan (LACAP)

The quantitative Baseline Emission Inventory were prepared in accordance with the methodology provided in “Technical Annex C: Climate Mitigation Assessment” of the Local Authority Climate Action Plan Guidelines” (DECC, 2023).These guidelines outlined the Tier 2 approach to be taken by the Local Authorities in the development of the Baseline Emissions Inventory at County Level. Tier 2 is the bottom-up approach for data analysis, which takes national datasets and local-scale datasets together to look at county wide GHG emissions across various sectors which include:

• Residential
• Manufacturing & Commercial
• Industrial Processes
• Agriculture
• Transport
• Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF)
• Waste
• F-gases

The methodology on how to complete the Climate Mitigation Assessment is outlined in “Technical Annex C: Climate Mitigation Assessment” of the Local Authority Climate Action Plan Guidelines” published in September 2022 (pages 24-30).

The Baseline Emissions Inventory (BEI) is a key instrument that will enable Local Authorities to measure the impact of all actions related to emission reductions across its own operations as well as varying sectors of society. The BEI represents an evidence-based approach to not only inform appropriate emission reduction actions, but also measure progress over time.

It is important to note that the BEI is a ‘snapshot in time’ of an area’s GHG emissions sources, and it is not an inventory of emission reduction opportunities ((page 17 (DECC, 2023)).

The methodology used for the analysis was developed using MapEIre and EPA data, and other publicly available local sources including:

• Electricity metered consumption data
• Central Statistics Office’s household census, agricultural census and transport Omnibus
• SEAI’s latest Energy in Ireland report, emission factors for fuels and grid electricity
• M&R system and National Building Energy Rating Database
• Valuation Office data on commercial buildings
• CIBSE energy benchmarks (Guide F and TM46)
• Agricultural energy and emissions benchmarks from sources such as Teagasc, Dept. Agriculture, Food and Marine, and the Carbon Trust

MapEIre is the state-of-the-art integrated model system to map emissions for Ireland’s emission inventories of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Based on a variety of spatial and statistical data, the MapEIre model produced detailed spatial emissions at a resolution of 1 km × 1 km (Plejdrup, 2018).

The MapEIre dataset was used to establish the BEI for each county. As there is currently no publicly available actual energy consumption data for every sector, the GHG dataset in combination with individual data sourced was used to calculate the energy consumption in the county.